Sea Star

“Similar die-offs had occurred before, but never at this scale….the stars were blinking out.”
—“A Starfish-Killing Disease Is Remaking the Oceans,” The Atlantic, January 2019

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A fleck of constellation
studded in a blank swathe of shore.

No fragments of mollusk,
no green tendrils. No trace

of your undersea universe
beyond the ocean’s shifting

border. I hover above you, ponder
your arrival. Do I imagine

your flinch as I wake you from stasis?
You freeze, rigid.

I gingerly lift and balance
your body between twigs,

reach water’s edge, flip you
right side up. A blurred wriggle—

descent in a blink.
Shallow waves wash over

impassive sand. Galaxies
of your sunflower kin dissolving

on reefs from Alaska to Mexico.
Go where the tide takes you, sea star.

What will be left?

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Ode to a Crow

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Dedicated to Canuck, East Vancouver’s famous crow

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Dark star of the show,
prankster, terror, tease, bad boy,
you ride the Skytrain for free, dive-bomb letter carriers,
target cyclists’ backpacks between rest stops at McDonalds.
Gas caps, cigarette packs, lighters–what’s ours is yours,
at least for ten seconds (if it’s shiny).
Peck on Playland cash registers like a pro,
snatch tickets at the racecourse,
plunk keys stolen months before
on a horse trainer’s head. The greatest flap?
Upstage the flaming car, armed suspect, cops with guns.
Swoop down, steal the evidence, steal the scene.
Cameras rolling, give chase, knife in beak. Then soar
into notoriety—CBC, ABC, The Guardian,
Washington Post, YouTube eternal, Facebook
and 106,000 followers. Your own hit movie.
No lone crow, you adopted a human pal
whose caress you’ll bear, whose arm you ride with pride.
Plus nightly hangouts with a six thousand caw choir
at the Still Creek rookery. Then you settled down.
A wife, a nest, two kids to feed. And now to mourn
in the cycle of effort and chance. For centuries
your kind observed our foibles, became our fables.
Subject of poetic tomes. Battlefield death-eater.
Hitchcock classic. Apollo’s pure white messenger
burnt black for uttering truth. But you transcend
omen, symbol, metaphor. The world’s your game.
Sleekly assured, you size us up with a darting glance.
A few hops, then off
to join those black streams ribboning the sky,
wings like satin fans against the dusk.

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(This poem was first published in a limited edition chapbook for the International Bird Congress in the summer of 2018).

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Fiona Tinwei Lam is the author of Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize), Enter the Chrysanthemum, and a forthcoming poetry collection, Odes & Laments (Caitlin Press, fall 2019).  She also authored the illustrated children’s book, The Rainbow Rocket. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published in over thirty anthologies (Canada, Hong Kong, and the US), including The Best Canadian Poetry in English (2010).  She lives in Vancouver.

Photo credits: sunflower star by Carolyn Coles via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0. Canuck the crow used with permission from Canuck and I. You can follow the adventures of Vancouver’s most famous crow on Instagram, which is lovingly produced by Vancouver photographer Shawn Bergman.